Trump Floats Seizure of Iran’s Kharg Island Oil Terminal Amid Gulf Troop Surge

The blunt talk of physically seizing Kharg echoes Britain’s 1951–53 struggle over Iran’s Abadan refinery and the 1956 Suez gamble—both attempts by outside powers to secure energy chokepoints that ultimately accelerated nationalist push-back. The episode also resurrects memories of the 1984–88 “Tanker War,” when Kharg was bombed repeatedly yet kept operating, underscoring how hard it is to silence the island without deep occupation. Strategically, Trump’s remarks sit at the confluence of two long-running dynamics: the U.S. ‘Carter Doctrine’ assumption (since 1980) that Persian-Gulf oil justifies military force, and a 21st-century pattern of threatening to leverage resource control for political concessions (Iraq 2003, Venezuela 2026). If Washington were to capture Kharg, it would set a modern precedent for outright appropriation of sovereign export infrastructure—something the post-1945 order has mostly deterred—potentially normalising resource seizures as great-power policy even as the world is supposed to be transitioning away from oil. On a century scale, the idea that a leading power can openly tout “taking the oil” suggests either a late-imperial overreach that could hasten U.S. strategic exhaustion, or the re-emergence of raw mercantilism in an energy-scarce, multipolar world; either way, it signals that the norms restraining resource wars since 1945 are fraying.